Pates and Bread, Daring Cooks Challenge

Valerie, from the Chocolate Bunny and Evelyne from Cheap Ethnic Eatz, are hosting June's Daring Cooks Challenge. They did indeed present a challenge. There were three pate recipes to choose from and then, of course, one must make bread to accompany the pate.

I chose to make the tricolor vegetable pate from their recipes. And then I thought about some of the pates that I had read about in the Frog Commissary Cookbook. This was one of the earliest, off the beaten path, cookbooks that I owned.

I lived in Philadelphia when Steve Poses had several restaurants going and would stop by the Commissary and look at their delicious takeout. This cookbook has perhaps one of the best carrot cake recipes.

I had always passed by the pates, not really something we eat a lot of. But they were calling to me.

The bread choice was easy. The Pain a l'Ancienne was one of my favorite breads from Peter Reinhart's, The Bread Baker's Apprentice. It is a very wet dough, 79% hydration and relies on cold fermentation. That is part of its allure, you make it one day, put it in the refrigerator and wake up to dough that is almost ready to be made into delicious baguettes.



The tricolor pate was easy to make. It has a white bean layer, a roasted red pepper layer and a basil, parsley pesto layer. It chilled in the refrigerator, unmolded easily and looked tempting surrounded by sliced bread.



The Frog Commissary cookbook had an interesting pate recipe for a country pate.



It included ground veal, ground pork, chicken livers, chicken breast and ham that had been soaked in brandy, pistachios, spices, eggs, cream and garlic. An amazing amount of ingredients that were formed into loaf pans lined with pork fat and cooked in a water bath.




They also had a seafood pate that combined salmon and scallops, two of my favorite things.



The delicate pink layer was filled with a line of dill, spinach, scallops.




I put everything out on the table, added some sausage and cheese. We all sat down to a delicious, unusual afternoon feast and promptly went off for an afternoon nap!